The present invention relates generally to the field of tape backup systems, and more particularly to providing efficient coordinated tape backup of large scale distributed systems.
Large scale distributed data systems provide enterprise level virtual computing environments with vast data storage requirements. Users of such environments benefit from the availability of tape backup systems, which provide a high storage volume at a relatively low cost. However, backing up the contents of large distributed environments to tape without significantly affecting the performance of the system remains challenging because the working data may be replicated, sliced, and stored on multiple physical storage devices across the underlying network.